Warfare and military history Archives

Van Feldgrau naar Kaki en Olijfgroen — J.J.J Hoogeboom

Published on April 9, 2025Leave a comment

Van Feldgrau naar Kaki en Olijfgroen

Van Feldgrau naar Kaki en Olijfgroen
J.J.J Hoogeboom
201 pages including notes and index
published in 2023

It’s a sad fact that during World War II many more men served in the German feldgrau than they did in the Allied khaki or olive green uniform; estimations ranger from roughly 25,000 to over 50,000, mostly volunteers. Most notoriously these men fought in the various Dutch Waffen-SS units, but others also served in the Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Wehrmacht and various local auxiliary German army units. Post-war all these people should have lost their Dutch citizenship and civil rights for serving in a foreign military at war with the Netherlands. This would’ve included being eligible for military service, yet both during the Indonesian decolonisation wars and in Korea, there were examples of ex-Waffen-SS volunteers and others fighting on the Dutch side.

How was this possible? Did these men just slip through the net or did the Dutch military know their histories? And if so, were they deliberately recruited for their aupposed military prowess? Was there an element of (unofficial) rehabilitation going on perhaps? And how were these men treated once their past became known to their comrades and the military as a whole? Were they discriminated against or were they valued for what they brought into battle? These are the questions Hoogeboom tries to answer in this short book. He does that largely based on three different sources: autobiographies where available, the archives of the special prosecution service that processed the men who served in the German army and the information the Dutch army itself had about those who served for them. Together these three sources give an insight into the careers and motivations of some of these men. What this book is therefore is a selection of case histories, Which Hoogeboom then puts into context. He looks at how these men got to serve again, whether or not their past was known and how they were treated during their service.

The tentative conclusion he draws is that there was no evidence of any official policy to recruit these volunteers, neither for their supposed prowess in warfare nor as a means to rehabilitate them. Furthermore, that there’s little to no evidence of any special treatment of these people while in service, either positive or negative.

That these men were able to serve is due to a number of elements. First is the lack of coordination between the armed services and the offices responsible for the prosecution of war volunteers. Quite a few managed to enlist as volunteers for service in Indonesia and Korea because the army didn’t know their past. Others were drafted even though they should’ve been ineligible. Second, some volunteers, especially younger ones, were treated more lenient than the law proscribed. Depending on their circumstances they kept the right to serve in the army and therefore were called up legitimately. Third, the prosecution against some was not yet started or only finished after they had been drafted or had volunteered. Finally, as the war years started to recede in memory, the zeal to prosecute these men abated; some escaped prosecution altogether.

Their treatment in service differed too depending on circumstances. There were no official policies to discriminate against them or even remove them from service once their past became known. Some were send back home from Indonesia on request by the prosecution; others were kept by their commanders requesting so. A few were harassed and bullied by their comrades once their status became public, but most seemed to have either managed to keep it hidden or were treated no different once it became known.

An interesting book. I knew already that ex-Nazi sympathisers had served in Indonesia, but I would’ve guessed there would’ve been some from of semi-official government policy to recruit them for this dirty war. What instead seems to have happened is that only accidentally these men managed to serve, in low enough numbers that it’s plausible that this was all accidental. This wasn’t anything like the rehabilitation of Nazi commanders and officers that happened in the 1950ties in West-Germany, to provide a cadre for the newly established Bundeswehr.

Medieval Military Technology — Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith

Published on July 2, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Medieval Military Technology

Medieval Military Technology
Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith
356 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Medieval Military Technology is an attempt to provide an overview of all aspects of Medieval weaponry and other technology in one book, as you might’ve suspected from the title. When this was originally published it was the first of its kind for the Middle Ages; this is the second edition. Trying to cover such a huge period like this is rather a challenge of course and that this books tries to cover all aspects of warfare means it can’t really go into too much detail on each individual aspect. Nevertheless an single volume overview like this was exactly what I was looking for, having gotten interested in the topic through watching too many medievaloid fantasy anime…

To be honest, this was a bit of a disappointment. DeVries and Smith turned out to be not very engaging as writers and the end result was a much more stodgy book than it could’ve been. Medieval Military Technology methodologically goes through first personal weaponry and armour, followed by siege weapons, fortifications and finally warships. Each separate part starts with an introduction that tries to sum of the history of its subject up to the Early Middle Ages before going into more detail in separate chapters on its various sub topics. Especially in the first part of the book this approach, detailing each and every possible Medieval weapon and bit of armour, is a bit dry. This is not helped by a lack of illustrations. A few more technical drawings, especially for all the various armour types would have been appreciated. The same lack of illustrations also hamper the other parts, but on the whole I found those to be easier to follow and less dull.

What I found also lacking was how all this technology was used in practise, how it evolved tactically and strategically, how the various bits worked together. Again, the first part is the worst for this because it has so many diverse types of weapons and armour to handle, few of which get more than a few pages to themselves. The only time when the impact of a specific technology is discussed is in chapter 3, about the invention of the stirrup and how it made mounted shock combat possible. Without a stirrup a knight could not brace himself for the shock of running somebody through with his spear or lance; with it he could. This invention arguably led to the invention of feudalism, as rulers had to depend on subjects rich enough to be able to afford to keep horses, therefore needing to grant them lands to be able to do so. DeVries and Smith go into detail on the merits of this thesis, summarising the arguments of supporters and opponents. It’s a strangely argumentative chapter in what’s otherwise a more encyclopedic work.

On the whole then, this was a decent enough overview but it’s not good enough for me to buy a copy for myself. You’d get much of the same value from reading the relevant pages on Wikipedia.

Walcheren to Waterloo — Andrew Limm

Published on July 1, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Walcheren to Waterloo

Walcheren to Waterloo: The British Army in the Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars 1793-1815
Andrew Limm
237 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

Back in the nineties, in order to pay my study fees, I used to work the Summers in a chips shop in Veere which was owned by the same people who owned the Campveerse Toren restaurant and hotel, which was the headquarters of the English expeditionary force to Walcheren in 1809. This has little relevance to the actual book to be discussed here, but if I cannot indulge myself in pointless anecdotes in my own booklog, where else? At the very least, this personal history is part of why this title grabbed my eye.

Alliterative as it is, Walcheren to Waterloo is a bit misleading however as Waterloo is barely discussed here, nor does the story start with that failed expedition to Walcheren. Instead, it’s a more general overview of the four different campaigns British forces fought int he Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars. Those in order being the campaign to occupy Dunkirk in 1793 and the following retreat through the Netherlands in 1795/95, the expedition to Northern Holland in 1799, the aforementioned campaign in Walcheren and finally the failed assault on Bergen Op Zoom in 1813-1814. You’ll note that none of these campaigns were at all successful, all ending in failure and British withdrawal from the Low Countries. This may explain why, as Limm shows in his introduction, these campaigns have received relatively little attention compared to Wellington’s campaigns in Portugal and Spain, let alone Waterloo. For Limm they are a good tool to attack the idea that the British Army had transformed itself between 1798 and 1809, by providing a counterexample to the successful British campaigns of the Peninsular War. As he attempts to show, each campaign, whether it took place before, during or after this supposed transformation, suffered from the same flaws, leading to their ultimate failure. This should not happen if the British Army, smarting from its defeats in the American Revolutionary War and their early interventions in the French Revolutionary Wars, was indeed transformed by the reforms enacting by the Duke of York during this period.

As Limm goes through each campaign in order, it does become clear that the same errors were made over and over again. Each campaign was marred by opportunism, the desire for a quick win overriding any other consideration. Planning for each was abysmal and had to be done in a hurry because each campaign was decided on at the spur of the moment. Intelligence about both the country to be fought in as the enemy forces to fight was always lacking, nor seemed to be a priority for the planners. Because of bad, hurried planning and lack of reliable intelligence, the logistics for each campaign were a shamble as well. The lack of cooperation and coordination between the army and navy, something that is somewhat important for an amphibious operation, did not help here either. The execution of each campaign is not inspiring either, with the nadir being the Walcheren campaign, which saw a large part of the expeditionary force fell ill with the Walcheren flu, which ended up killing thousands. Because clear objectives were lacking due to the rushed planning, each campaign ended up spinning their wheels in search of one. While individual battles were won, strategically each was a failure.

The same pattern repeats time and again. The English manage to land with some difficulty, win their early battles and maybe reach some of the objectives before the lack of planning lets them down. Making the problem worse is the preference each commander seems to have had for over complicating his attack plans, needlessly splitting up his forces instead of concentrating them, as best shown in the campaign in North Holland. There it meant that part of the allied Anglo Russian forces had secured their objectives, but were now too far away to influence of the battles elsewhere, leading to piecemeal defeats there. Though not fatal, these defeats means that the French and Dutch forces opposing them get the space to reorganise and be reinforced, leading to a loss of momentum and ultimately a retreat when the expedition’s nominal goals can no longer be achieved.

That this happened during the early campaigns at Dunkirk and Den Helder is one thing, but that this was repeated at Walcheren and Bergen op Zoom indicates that nothing was learned from these earlier failures even when some of the same people were involved. This is one of Limm’s key points, that the Napoleonic Era British Army did not have any sort of institutional memory nor did its leaders have any desire to examine and learn from those failures. The British also had a nasty habit of blaming their allies for their own failures, as with the Russians in the North Holland campaign. The conclusion he reaches is that it took the exceptional talents and dedication of a Wellington to achieve any semblance of this, but that this was limited to him and his direct staff and commanders. Because it was Wellington driving the campaigns in Spain and at Waterloo they were successful; with any other commander this may not have been the case.

an interesting read if with a slightly misleading title. One thing I did struggle with was that Limm’s command of Dutch geography and place names is not always the greatest. Texel is not a river (it’s an island) and Den Helder is not at the mouth of it. Limm also has a habit of making the armies march in a northern or southern direction when would be more fitting to speak of a easterly or westerly one. It took some getting used to and some squinting at maps to make things clear. It would also have been appreciated if the maps had been located in their respective chapters, rather than clustered in the front of the book. Small quibbles for what was an enlightening look at a military period I knew little about.

1983: The World at the Brink — Taylor Downing

Published on May 26, 2023Leave a comment

Cover of 1983

1983: The World at the Brink
Taylor Downing
391 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

If there ever was a movie that embodied the fears about nuclear war I had living through the early eighties, just old enough to understand the concept, it has to be Threads. I turned nine that year, just old enough to start to comprehend what nuclear war would be like. We had an insane cowboy in the White House who talked about a winneable nuclear war and a series of rapidly decomposing, extremely paranoid leaders in the Kremlin. One small mistake and the world would’ve ended. And while I didn’t learn about Threads long after the cold War had ended, I really didn’t need it to have nightmares. Any mention of anything nuclear on the news was enough to set them off. It didn’t help either that pop culture at that point was saturated with nuclear war imagery.

Fortunately, Threads was never broadcast in the Netherlands at that time, or I would’ve never been able to sleep ever again. Learning about it in a BBC retrospective somewhere around the turn of the millennium was traumatising enough already for the nightmares to return. That shot of the mushroom cloud going up over Sheffield with the old lady in the foreground pissing herself. That was the sort of fear and anxiety, that feeling of helplessness I grew up with in the eighties, in a country where you couldn’t pretend that you could have cool adventures fighting mutants afterwards. No, you either be dead or wishing you were. Being a sensitive kid I didn’t need to see nuclear war movies to imagine how horrible it would be. Which is why I won’t be celebrating Threads day by finally watching it.

Threads: Thursday May 26th 08:00

No, I prefer to feed my nightmares through print, like with Nigel Calder’s Nuclear Nightmares which I reread a couple of years ago. As with so many people my age I know, I can’t help but occasionally pick at that scab. Especially as I got older and learned more about the realities behind my nightmares, I can’t help but want to learn more about it, to confirm my fears weren’t unfounded. 1983: The World at the Brink is very good at doing exactly that. It not only confirmed that my childhood nuclear war paranoia was justified, it showed things were so much worse than I could’ve ever imagined back then. 1983 may very well have been the most dangerous year of the entire Cold War.

The way Taylor Downing sets about showing why this is the case is by providing a chronological overview of the year and its crisises, until about two-thirds into the book we hit the ultimate crisis point, the moment civilisation could’ve ended if things had gone even slightly differently. He starts with a short explanation of the context in which these incidents took place. How the detente of the seventies had ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan, gun-ho to take on the Evil Empire, in 1980. That with the death of Brezhnev in 1982, the head of the KGB, Andropov would be made the leader of the USSR,a man made paranoid by the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which he played a role in suppressing. Here there was a leader of the Free West who started talking about a winnable nuclear war opposite a Soviet leader deadly paranoid about attacks on his ‘socialist paradise’. Not a good combination in a time when tensions were already rising due to Afghanistan.

In 1981, while still head of the KGB, Andropov had already launched Operation RYAN, an intelligence programme aimed at determining whether the US and NATO were preparing for a nuclear first strike. By 1983 this operation was intensified as the US was starting to deploy cruise missile and Pershing II nuclear missiles to Europe as part of Reagan’s general re-armament plans. While RYAN was intended as a safety measure, its real effect was to feed Andropov’s paranoia, making him increasingly concerned that the US was planning a first strike. Reagan meanwhile, cheerfully unaware of this, was talking up plans to create a missile defence system against nuclear attacks, making America invulnerable. Regardless of the technical merits of Star Wars, even thinking about such a defence against nuclear attack was threatening the status quo of mutually assured destruction. Peace was being maintained because both sides could destroy the other completely, regardless of who shot first. There was no advantage in starting a nuclear war as long as everybody died in it. But if an increasing technological advance meant the US could defend itself, or could unleash such a devastating first strike that retaliation was impossible, that put the USSR in a dilemma. If the US was preparing a strike, the Soviets should strike immediately before the strike had even launched, or risk being caught off guard. And that was much more ripe for error than if you wait until the missiles have actually launched.

And then, in September 1983, a Korean airliner blundered into Soviet airspace, was mistaken for an American military spy plane and through a series of tragic errors, shut down with all passengers and crew killed. That immediately shut down any tentative prospect of unfreezing the Cold War. It strengthened Reagan’s opinion about the USSR being an evil empire, while it also fed Andropov’s paranoia about the country’s vulnerabilities, that an airliner had been allowed to enter sensitive airspace unchallenged. All this set the stage for Able Archer, a NATO military exercise, which simulated a Soviet invasion of West Germany culminating in a NATO nuclear strike to stop the advance. A so-called command post exercise, in which the various military headquarters were involved but not so much soldiers out in the field, the USSR was convinced it would be cover for a real first strike against it. It had take measures to reduce its vulnerability, by putting its nuclear forces on high alert, by making the preparations for a strike so that if it was necessary it could be done almost immediately. All that was needed was for Andropov to become convinced America was about to strike and give the order to strike first. And the moment that would happen came increasingly close as the NATO exercise grew in intensity.

At this point in the book Downing had thrown me deep into that paranoid mindset; my relief when the crisis passed was palpable, even knowing full well nuclear war hadn’t happened in November 1983. The rest of 1983: The World at the Brink is more cheerful, describing how both leaders walk themselves back from the abyss. How with the deaths of first Andropov and then his successor Chernenko the way was freed up for Gorbachev, a true reformer who managed to build a personal bond with Reagan, who set in motion the events that would lead to the end of the Cold War as well as the Soviet Union. Even more than three decades onwards, it’s still a miracle such a vast and powerful empire could be dissolved mostly peacefully, that we didn’t all die in nuclear shock waves in November 1983.

If you’re my generation, this book then is the confirmation of all the old bad dreams you had back then. If you’re too young to have lived through it yourself, a good look back a period where all this was normal.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II — Michael Green

Published on April 30, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of American Tanks & AFVs of World War II

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II
Michael Green
376 pages including notes & index
published in 2014

It’s a fact of life that interest in World War II armour tends to focus on Nazi Germany, with Soviet vehicles perhaps a distant second. Understandable, considering how many interesting and downright strange types made it into production or had at least a prototype created. It’s always tempting to think about what if those potential wunderwaffen had made it into service, whereas the realities of western allied armour are always much more mundane. At least the French and to a lesser extend, the British, had some cool but impractical dead ends available in the early war, but American armour was just relentlessly pragmatic. the answer to any problem encountered seemed to be let’s build more Shermans, rather than creating some new exotic prototype.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II does nothing to disabuse you of those preconceptions. Yes, there are some what ifs to be found, but in case after case what Michael Green documents here is the ruthless pragmaticism of the US army during world War II. It’s not just that the whole design and procurement process was much more centralised and efficient than that of Nazi Germany — but it certainly helped that there was no Hitler type mucking about on the US side. It’s also that the first instinct was always to look for solutions through modifying existing vehicles, rather than creating new ones. A determination not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even good enough. If it worked, why replace it just because there was a better option? That’s the attitude that comes across reading this book.

After a short introduction, American Tanks & AFVs of World War II starts with the development of medium tanks between the wars, culminating in the M3, the first major US tank of World War II, which saw action in North Africa and Italy, as well as the Pacific. This is followed by a long chapter on the development of the ultimate American medium tank, the M4 or Sherman. The Sherman as a tank had always been a bit confusing to me, because its long production and gradual evolution meant there were a confusing number of subvariants and it isn’t always easy to distinguish them. Therefore I appreciate Michael Green’s efforts here to make sense of them all. With the focus on World War II it’s not an entirely complete story of course, as there were numerous post-war variants as well. Not to mention British variants like the infamous Firefly.

The chapters on light and heavy tanks are together only slightly longer than the M4 chapter, which shows its importance. The heavy tank was never that much of a priority to the US army in the war; there never was an equivalent of the Tiger. The 75 or 76 mm armed Sherman was deemed good enough. When there was a demand for a more heavier armoured tank therefore, the Sherman was up-armoured rather than a new tank created. The only tank taken into service that could be classified as heavy would be the M26 Pershing, which only arrived very late in the war. On the light tank front, things were somewhat different. The M3 and M5 series were excellent scout vehicles much used by both the US and the British/Commonwealth, while the M24 was the ultimate WWII light tank, armed with a similar 75mm gun to the Sherman. Again it’s telling that the 37mm armed M3/M5s were kept in service for so long despite their main armament being obsolete almost from their introduction. Their role wasn’t to fight other tanks and the US was never tempted to upgun them just because they could.

Tank destroyers were an important part of US army doctrine, as they were intended to fight enemy tanks rather than leaving it to the tanks themselves. This used to be the tasks of towed anti-tank guns before the war, but the German blitzkrieg put paid to the notion that towed guns could suffice. The first generation of tank destroyers mated existing, often obsolete guns with wheeled vehicles or half tracks. There was e.g. the M3 half track with a World War I vintage 75mm gun that was used in North Africa and Sicily. With the limitations of this sort of design becoming obvious, the next step was to create tank destroyers from existing medium tanks. The M10, M18 and M36 all used the M4 chassis with new turrents and different guns: a 3 inch, 75mm and 90mm respectively as demands for more fire power increased.

The remaining chapters detail the more niche armoured vehicles used in World War II: armoured cars and half tracks, self propelled artillery and tracked landing vehicles. The ruthless pragmatism of the US army really shows through well in these first two categories, with only a very limited number of different armoured cars and half tracks ever taken into series production. The first especially, with only a few types of light armoured cars taken into service and no heavy ones, unlike other armies. With self propelled artillery, there was the same sort of trajectory as with tank destroyers: first using wheeled vehicles before moving on to using the M3 and M4 tank chassis. Tracked landing vehicles were of course mostly used in the Pacific, but also by some of the river crossings in North West Europe late in the war. Again, any improvement here was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, with heavier armament added as needed.

If you want a one shot overview of American tank and armoured vehicle development during World War II, this is an excellent introduction. Plenty of excellent photos and illustrations too help tell the story. Recommended.